The popular gaming site muses on the art of annoying bloggers.

I haven't been hit by anything like this yet while writing for OT, but Ars itself has had many viral marketers join the forums as regular posters to try to hype a product. The most amusing was when NGage came out, and the posters usually have a low enough post count and are slavish enough in their press releases that they are caught pretty quick. A quick google for their names usually picks up hits on other gaming forums as well.

That sort of thing, as well the email hyping Joystiq experienced about the Perfect Dark: Zero demo, is to be expected. Anything to get some buzz going. Sadly, on email it's harder to detect and fight. While relatively benign, even with five billion emails if the story isn't interesting I won't cover it, this sort of thing still looks bad.

The dumb thing is having a Perfect Dark: Zero demo at Walmart is a story that places like Opposable Thumbs and Joystiq would cover, so this kind of action turns an actual blurb into something that now looks negative. No one said advertisers were smart.